Patron Pick – Ferngully: The Last Rainforest

This special reward is available to Patreon patrons who pledge at the $10 or $20 monthly levels. Each month, those patrons will pick a film for me to review. If they choose, they also get to include some of their thoughts about the movie. This Pick comes from Bekah Lindstrom.

Ferngully: The Last Rainforest (1992)
Written by Jim Cox
Directed by Bill Kroyer

The 1990s was a strange time for the environmentalist movement. My perspective was shaped at the time by hyper-conservative Christian fundie parents who, fed by their own propaganda sewer, insisted that anything about protecting nature from corporate greed was “new age, pagan filth.” We didn’t watch Captain Planet in my house for that very reason. Not that I was really missing anything. Upon visiting that show for the first time as an adult, I was very unimpressed, but I can now see also the stuff I did like at the time as very pandering, shallow commercialism. My parents didn’t have a problem with the mass marketing to children part of things; they loved capitalism. All this to say, I never watched Ferngully until this Patron request. Without the rose-colored nostalgia of my childhood to lean on for this one, it is pretty bad as far as kids’ movies go.

Beginning with a large amount of lore dumping (never a good sign), we are introduced to the fairies who live in Ferngully, a magical rainforest that, up until that moment, has been free of interference by humans. Long ago, an evil spirit named Hexxus (Tim Curry) was trapped in a tree here, and since then, things have been peaceful. Human loggers chop the tree down, and Hexxus is released, resuming his reign of terror against the fairies. Meanwhile, Zak, one of the human loggers, is accidentally shrunk by Crysta (Samantha Mathis). She brings the human back to her home with the hope that Magi, her elderly mentor, can help. Along the way, they meet Batty Koda (Robin Williams), a bat who has escaped from a testing facility and, as a result, has a manic personality. It all clocks in at just over an hour, so the movie has that going for it.

The impetus of the film is undoubtedly coming from the right place. The filmmakers were passionate about protecting the environment and wanted to make an animated kids’ film about the topic without being preachy. The success of Disney’s The Little Mermaid in 1989 caused other studios to open the coffers to animated films of their own so Ferngully could be made. It was one of the earliest films to use computer animation alongside 2-D significantly, with 40,000 digital frames present. It was also Robin Williams’ first animated role, which he would repeat with Aladdin the same year.

My biggest problem with Ferngully, especially after recently watching something as incredible as Babe: Pig in the City, is that the movie has no personality. I can understand if you clicked with this movie as a child and it is a nostalgic favorite, but as someone who just saw it, all I could feel were shallow Saturday morning cartoon vibes. In an effort to refrain from being “too preachy,” the movie barely says anything about the topic it was built on. Hexxus is so abstract as a villain, and the picture doesn’t make the explicit connection you need in kids’ movies on a subject that children probably don’t understand the nuances of.

Despite never seeing it, I remember things about this movie, mainly a promotional Pizza Hut cup that somehow ended up in our house. That’s what was a massive contradictory problem with all of the kids’ targeted environmental media of the 1990s. From Captain Planet to Toxic Crusaders to this film, it all came with mass merchandising, almost always in the form of colorful pieces of plastic. This is why educating children about the environment feels impossible in the States. To create something with a large enough spread to be seen will also inevitably involve agreeing to let the studio merchandise the fuck out of the thing. Thanks, Star Wars.

The end of Ferngully results in nothing meaningful happening on the environmental front. Hexxus is imprisoned again, but what’s to stop them from happening once another group of loggers shows up? Once back to his standard size, Zak tells two coworkers, “Something’s got to change.” What that is, the movie never states. Being the self-aware kid I was, if I had seen this movie in 1992, I would have thought that it was only a matter of time before these fairies were killed by future loggers. 

Films like Ferngully reinforce my belief that seeking to make systemic change by working with the institutions responsible for the problems will never lead to anything meaningful. Anything aimed at kids will be expected to produce future landfill materials like toys and clothes. The movie’s message will be so softened and blurred that it ultimately says nothing. The best you can hope for are some earworm songs. I didn’t find the music here to be anything notable. 

If this was imprinted on you as a child, I’m sure you love Batty’s rap. But as a grown adult and a former primary school teacher, I don’t see the core message being communicated effectively. The film jumps all over the place, tosses so many disparate elements together, and never finds a way to tie them together. Williams’ Batty feels like a character from an entirely different film. There’s a brief moment where Tone Loc cameos as a lizard that, aside from a song, bears no weight on the plot. Hexxus feels like a contradiction, a villain too charismatic to be seen as a personification of pollution. Ferngully was the beginning of a period of animation at 20th Century Fox, none of which I ever found to be all that spectacular. I wish this movie was better and delivered its message beautifully, but that’s not the case.